A lifetime model of online video popularity

Popular online Video-on-Demand (VoD) services all maintain a large catalog of videos for their users to access. The number of servers assigned to serve each video is directly related to the relative popularity of the video. The distribution of popularity at a given time is quite well understood. We study how the video popularity changes over its lifetime, for different types of videos. Our study is based on analyzing the video access levels over time, based on data provided by a large video service provider. Our main finding is, while there are variations, the glory days of a video typically pass by quickly and probability of replaying a video by the same user is low. The reason appears to be due to fairly regular number of users and view time per day for each user, and continuous arrival of new videos. We then discuss the implication of our findings for video replication and recommendation.